Instagram stories for beginners

How do you create engaging Instagram stories? What is the appeal?

Surprisingly, it's not all about being perfectly polished and professional.

Social Media Examiner said, "Stories provide a way for you to become closer with your fans and followers, especially when you’re talking to your phone or a camera right in your face. The vertical video feels real and honest in a way that a lot of other video doesn’t."

Stories are a great way to connect to your fans in a less formal way, so embrace it! Tell your story!

Creating Instagram Stories People Love to Watch

To explore how to create short-form Instagram stories people love to watch, I interview filmmaker, photographer, and video influencer Jesse Driftwood.Jesse knows that people are on Instagram only for a short time so he tries to keep his videos as short as possible.

Facebook ads have been growing and changing a lot recently, and Instagram ads are next.

Marketing Land reported, "Instagram confirmed it is exploring more ways for brands to amplify content from influencers. The company has been testing a new branded content ad format since last year that allows brands to turn posts created by influencers into ads on the platform."

This is especially relevant for ecommerce sites because of the option to sell your items on Instagram. Boosting posts on the app that link directly to products could see a lot of success!

The company has been testing a new branded content ad format since last year that allows brands to turn posts created by influencers into ads on the platform.“We got great feedback from the brands that participated that this ad product [...]

If you want to increase engagement on your Instagram page, it's a good idea to check the statistics. Between the different types of posts, multiple images are shown to have 2.2% more engagement than single posts, but video posts perform 18.6% better than those multiple image posts. How do your caption lengths match up to other users? Marketing Profs said, "Some 31.7% of the posts analyzed had descriptions consisting of 300+ characters in length, 30% had descriptions between 150-300 characters in length, and 38.4% had descriptions under 150 characters in length."

Instagram Brand Benchmarks: Engagement, Hashtags & Emojis

http://www.marketingprofs.com

Video posts garner 21.2% more engagement, on average, compared with image posts.About the research: The report was based on data from an analysis of more than 8.9 million posts made by 44,432 Instagram Business profiles between January 1 and September [...]

Instagram recently rolled out a new format for their app. They say it was meant to be tested with a small audience and unexpectedly affected more users than they intended. In this version of the app, all posts were like the story mode where you tap to make your way through them. The Verge said, "The new horizontal layout seems only to affect the main feed — tap into a user’s individual profile, and things will appear as they always have in the usual, vertically scrolling style." This didn't last very long - which is good because many users were very upset! Based on the negative reactions it's probably safe to say that Instagram has some work to do if they ever want to implement the horizontal feed.

Instagram briefly switched to a horizontal feed and people freaked out

http://www.theverge.com

Instagram has quietly started testing a horizontal feed for some users, a huge sideways shift from the vertically scrolling user experience that’s been the norm since the app launched.The new horizontal layout seems only to affect the main feed — [...]